Jan Null, a meteorology lecturer, teaches an extreme weather course at San Francisco State University in San Francisco, Calif., Monday, January 28, 2013.

Jan Null, a meteorology lecturer, teaches an extreme weather course at San Francisco State University in San Francisco, Calif., Monday, January 28, 2013.

Photo: Sarah Rice, Special To The Chronicle

Image 2 of 3

Meteorologist Jan Null (right) teaches a course in extreme weather in the geosciences department at S.F. State University.

Meteorologist Jan Null (right) teaches a course in extreme weather in the geosciences department at S.F. State University.

Photo: Sarah Rice, Special To The Chronicle

Image 3 of 3

Jan Null is the hot name in weather

1 / 3

Back to Gallery

Jan Null expected to be a radio technician when he joined the Army, but he ended up manning a machine gun on a Huey as it swooped into enemy fire to rescue soldiers in Vietnam.

It was an important lesson for a man who makes his living dealing with turbulent situations.

"Being a veteran ultimately helped me get into the weather service," said the 62-year-old Saratoga meteorologist, who prides himself on his ability to predict the unpredictable. "One of the big takeaways from my time in helicopters was the need for weather information for flight operations."

Dodging bullets in the steamy jungles of Vietnam was only a small part of what helped Null become one of the Bay Area's most sought-after weather consultants and forensic meteorologists. The former National Weather Service forecaster has served as an expert witness in 350 court cases, reconstructing weather conditions and providing analysis for forensic purposes.

He consults with utilities, environmental groups, news organizations, and insurance and engineering firms on weather trends, historic events and meteorological probabilities. He provides weather analysis for energy companies for solar panel installations and has published dozens of articles and scientific studies about everything from renewable energy to the weather pattern El Niño.

Null also has become the nation's recognized expert on heatstroke deaths of children left in hot cars.

In 2001, a 5-month-old boy died after being left in a hot car in San Jose with the windows rolled up. In the wake of the tragedy, Null was asked by reporters if he knew how hot it had gotten in the car. It was an important issue given that, on average, 38 children die every year in the United States after being left in parked cars.

Null quickly found out that no studies had been done on the subject, so he began taking the temperature inside his own car. He found that temperatures inside a closed car rose an average of 19 degrees in the first 10 minutes and 34 degrees in the first half hour. After one hour, the average temperature inside a car was 43 degrees above the outside temperature. In other words, the inside of a car parked during an 80-degree day will reach 123 degrees within an hour, he said.

The sobering information prompted him to expand the research. He found that children as young as 5 days and as old as 14 years have died from hyperthermia, or heatstroke, in parked cars. In a case in El Cerrito, the outside temperature was only 67 degrees when an infant died in the car.

More than half of the children were under age 2 and were simply forgotten by the caregiver, primarily because they were out of sight in the backseat, according to Null's research.

Study of heatstroke

In 2003, Null began consulting with emergency doctors at Stanford University on how the body reacts to heatstroke. Their study, published in the journal Pediatrics in 2005, is the seminal study on the issue.

"He had a vision, knew that this was a problem and was trying to bring it some public awareness, which this paper certainly has," said Dr. James Quinn, a professor of surgery and an emergency room doctor at Stanford Medical Center, and a co-author on the study with Null and emergency room resident Catherine McLaren. "It's a devastating, terrible problem, and I was really impressed during the research how well he mentored one of my trainees (McLaren). I get more calls about that study than for any of my other research. "

Born in Oakland in 1950, Null was the second of three children in a middle-class family. His parents, Edward and Jean, were married in Colorado just before World War II and settled in the Bay Area.

One of his most vivid memories from childhood was seeing the widespread flooding in the Central Valley in December 1955 during a Christmas trip to visit family friends in the Chico area. The flooding, which caused 74 deaths and $200 million in damage, was so extensive that year that a statewide disaster was declared.

"I was only 5 years old, but I remember having to make lots of detours around flooded areas," he said. "My knowledge of it has been enhanced by things I've read about it throughout the rest of my career, but having seen it as a child gives me some visual context and certainly makes it easier for me to explain it."

Null's father managed a camera store in Oakland until 1960 and then taught photography at Oakland's Laney College until his retirement in 1970. Null's access to cameras, darkrooms and film through his father led to a lifelong love of photography.

In 1963, when he was 13, the family moved from Oakland to Castro Valley, where Null attended Canyon High School. Null loved math and science from an early age and,after graduating in 1967, began studying at Chabot College to become an astronomer, working between classes at Oakland's Chabot Space and Science Center.

These were restless times. Antiwar protests were raging across the nation. Null was afraid that he would end up in the infantry in Vietnam if he waited to be drafted, so he enlisted in the Army.

"I was going through a lot of the indecision that young people go through about what to do with their lives and what's going on around them," said Null, who believes his decision was more an attempt to find himself than to follow in the footsteps of his father, who as an Army warrant officer during World War II had specialized in combat photography. "This was in 1968 during the antiwar period, so I wanted to know what was going on. I wanted to do my own thing. It was more of a personal challenge."

He trained in avionics and figured he would end up working on helicopter radio systems. The next thing he knew he was manning a door-mounted M-60 machine gun on harrowing helicopter expeditions through enemy fire.

"We were basically a bus. We took people into and out of the badlands," he said. "I was the door gunner on the right side of the aircraft. My job was to put down lots of suppressing fire into the grass and trees."

Null's Huey was hit once by an enemy round and had to make a crash landing, but nobody was injured and they were out of enemy range by the time the helicopter went down. Everyone was eventually rescued.

"There were lots of tense moments," he said. "I was incredibly lucky."

Null developed an understanding of the role the weather played in combat operations.

"I remember some of the torrential rain during the summer monsoon season," he said. "It was like standing under a shower, but it had two good side benefits. First, it cooled temperatures, and, more importantly, most flight operations were suspended."

Buffeted in flight

It was during a rainstorm in SocTrang, in the Mekong Delta, when he was informed that his father had suffered a debilitating stroke. On his way home, he was the only passenger on a flight to Saigon that he described as "like a roller coaster all the way for the 100 mile trip with continuous up and down drafts."

Null said he was truly thankful when he flew out of Vietnam for the last time on Thanksgiving Day 1969.

Back in the states, Null changed his focus from the stars to the skies upon discovering that astronomy jobs were scarce. He got married in 1973, graduated from UC Davis with a degree in atmospheric science in 1974, and had two children, Jeff, now 35, of Castro Valley, and Kim, now 32, of Milpitas.

The Veterans Preference Act helped Null beat out numerous applicants for a summer trainee position with the National Weather Service, and after landing an internship there upon graduating from college, he worked his way up the ladder, serving as the agency's hydrologist, shift supervisor, lead forecaster, computer systems manager and, often, media spokesman.

In academia

In 1987, Null began teaching one night a week at San Francisco State University, where he is still an adjunct professor in the department of geosciences, teaching introductory and extreme-weather courses in meteorology for three hours every Monday night. In 1992, he got a master's degree in geography from San Jose State University. His thesis was "A Climatology of San Francisco Rainfall."

In 1997, a few years after the National Weather Service moved its operation center from Redwood City to Monterey, Null, tired of commuting, took early retirement and founded Golden Gate Weather Services out of his home in Saratoga.

He now works at an L-shaped desk in a corner room of his home, with views through the windows of his side and front yards and a hanging hummingbird feeder. Next to the dark wood desk are bookshelves, on top of which stand a balsa wood model that Null made of the Golden Gate Bridge.

He is a fount of information about Bay Area microclimates, precipitation and weird weather patterns, including epic storms, drought, strange atmospheric oscillations and the mid-Pacific warming pattern known as El Niño. He is not a climatologist, but he has documented recent increases in the frequency of dry years in the Bay Area and believes some of the effects of global warming are beginning to show themselves.

"There are too many peer-reviewed studies for there to be any doubt about whether there is global warming or that it is anthropogenic," Null said.

Still, he said, blaming any one storm - including Superstorm Sandy - on climate change is the equivalent of picking one Barry Bonds home run and saying it happened because of steroids. There is no way of knowing if it would have happened anyway, he said.

Null, whose first marriage ended in divorce, married Realtor Susan Hollis in November 2007 after meeting her through an online dating service. It was an outdoor wedding in San Jose in November, a risky proposition, but Null staked his reputation on the sun. It obliged. He said it was the most important forecast he ever made.

Like everyone, he has anxiety dreams, usually involving some terrifying kaleidoscopic mix of bloody combat and botched weather forecasts. He sometimes bolts out of bed at night to listen for the rain he predicted.

Long-range forecasting

Null believes the future of meteorology is in long-range forecasting, which would require much more powerful computers and sophisticated modeling systems. The ability to forecast the weather weeks and months in advance would result in huge economic benefits, particularly in the agricultural sector. The key, he said, is for our educational system to turn out more scientists and researchers to make the innovations that are necessary, a process to which he hopes he is making a contribution.

"That's what's so fun about meteorology. It touches so many different sectors," he said. "It certainly is not for everybody. You need to be comfortable with math, science and geography, but it is rewarding. Every day is different."